Matthew Wilson

Leslie Hewitt’s photographs rest in sturdy wooden frames that lean against the wall and invite viewers to experience a unique space between photography and sculpture. Her work combines still life compositions comprised of political, social, and personal materials, which result in multiple histories seen embedded in sculptural, architectural, and abstract forms. Mundane objects and structures open into complex systems of knowledge. This perceptual slippage is what attracts Hewitt to both the illusions of film (still and moving photography) and the undeniable presence of physical objects (sculpture). Exploring this as an artist and not as a historiographer, Hewitt draws parallels between the formal appearance of things and their significance to collective history and political consciousness in contemporary art. In her lecture, Hewitt will discuss the development of her practice and recent collaborations.

Leslie Hewitt is an artist living in New York City. She graduated from The Cooper Union’s School of Art in 2000 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 2004. From 2001-2003, she studied Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University. Hewitt has displayed her work in exhibitions in a number of American and international galleries, and her work is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art; Guggenheim Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, the Yale Art Gallery, among others. Hewitt was represented in MoMA’s New Photography 2009, a thematic presentation of significant recent work in photography that examines and expands the conventional definitions of the medium. In 2010, she received the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant and Joyce Alexander Wein Prize. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others.

More information can be found here:

Leslie Hewitt

Leslie Hewitt artforum.com / 500 words 

Leslie Hewitt – Sikkema Jenkins

Mary Reid Kelley was born in South Carolina in 1979. She studied Art and Women’s Studies at St. Olaf College and received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2009. The videos she makes in collaboration with her husband, artist Patrick Kelley, have been shown in New York, Los Angeles, and London. Other exhibitions include The Wexner Center for the Arts (2012); Bard CCS (2012), MACRO Rome (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2010); and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010). Mary and Patrick completed a commissioned video for the 2010 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, The Dissolve. In August 2013 the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston will present an exhibition of the video work.

An interest in language, literature and history informs their work, which combines video, poetry, animation, performance, and painting. The videos have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, and Art in America. The making of The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011) was documented in Season Six of Art21, episode “History”. From 2011 to 2012 Mary and Patrick resided at the American Academy in Rome, and now live in upstate New York.

More information can be found here:

http://maryreidkelley.com/

Art 21: Mary Reid Kelley: “You Make Me Iliad” 

Finding the Reason in Mary Reid Kelley’s Mad Rhymes About French History

Filmmaker, theorist, and author Hito Steyerl examines pop culture, social issues, and gender politics through the moving image. Her work is highly self-referential; Steyerl is adamant that one must understand his or her own role in social issues before exploring such topics artistically. As a result, she is often featured in many of her works. Drawing inspiration from her dual heritage, Steyerl is greatly influenced by both German and Japanese avant-garde film. In addition to solo exhibitions throughout Europe, Steyerl’s work has been included in numerous art shows including the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2004), Manifesta 5 (2004), dOCUMENTA (12) (2007) and the Shanghai Biennale (2008), among others.  Recent solo exhibitions include Hito Steyerl, e-flux, New York, 2011 and focus: Hito Steyerl, The Art Institute Chicago, 2012−2013.  A collection of her essays is recently published in The Wretched of the Screen (2012).  Steyerl holds a PhD in philosophy, currently serves as a professor for media arts at the University of Arts Berlin and has taught film theory at both Goldsmith College and Bard College.

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

More information can be found here:

Making: Hito Steyerl [Is the musem a battlefield?] at the 2012 Creative Time Summit (video)

NYTimes: Memorials, Along With Some Mischief Hito Steyerl Has New York Solo Debut at e-flux (2012)

Frieze Magazine: Hito Steyerl at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany (2009)

Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969. She received a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. She has received critical acclaim for her public commissions and site-specific installations, including recent commissions for the New York City High Line, the Cartier Foundation, the Carnegie International and the São Paolo Biennial. A MacArthur Fellow and Louis Comfort Tiffany Award winner, she has challenged architectures and captivated viewers with her large-scale constructions that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings, burrow into the ground and stretch across museums. Solo museum projects include at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Asia Society in New York, and The Institute of Contemporary Art, London.  Sarah Sze is Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts.  She has been chosen to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia in 2013. Her work will be presented by Holly Block and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in the 55th International Art Exhibition.

More information can be found here:

Art21 SEGMENT: Sarah Sze in “Balance” (video) 2012

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Charlie White is a Los Angeles-based artist and associate professor at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. White’s work spans photography, film, animation, writing, and, most recently, experimental pop music. He has exhibited internationally since 1999, including shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, PS1 New York, ICA Philadelphia, the Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum, Oslo Kunstforening (Norway), and Center of Contemporary Art of Salamanca (Spain). White was selected for the 2011 Singapore Biennale, and his films have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival and Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. White’s most recent monographs include American Minor, (JPR Ringier, 2009), and Such Appetite (LBM, 2013). In addition to his studio work, White’s writing has been published in Artforum, and his essay “Minor Threat” was included in the publication Words Without Pictures (Aperture Press). Currently, White is completing his Music for Sleeping Children project, an free online experimental pop album, and working on a feature film project.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/6nwXHQeKR20[/youtube]

More information can be found here:

Music for Sleeping Children

Charlie White Website

Study of Teenage Girls

JONAH FREEMAN was born in 1975 in Santa Fe, NM and lives and works in New York City. He has a degree in Film Production and Dramatic Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Since 1998 he has been exhibiting film/video, photo and environmental installations in galleries and museums worldwide. His several interconnected bodies of work have been primarily focused on the phantasmagoria of the constructed world. Recent solo exhibitions include Stray Light Grey, Marlborough Chelsea, NY (2012); Bright White Underground, Country Club, LA (2010); Black Acid Co-op, Deitch Projects, NYC (2009); In The Kaleidoscope Room, Mitterrand + Sanz, Zurich (2009); Hello Meth Lab In The Sun, Ballroom Marfa, (2008); The Long Goodbye, John Connelly Presents, NYC (2007); The Franklin Abraham, Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC (2005); and In the Public Realm: Sixteen Scenarios, Public Art Fund, Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn, NY (2002). His films have screened in several film festivals that include The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Locarno International Film Festival and The Rome International Film Festival. His work has also been represented in the recent group shows: Paper Exhibition, Artists Space, NYC (2009); The Station, Miami, FL. (2008); The Future As Disruption, The Kitchen, NYC (2008); Le Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine, Saint Gervais, Geneva, Switzerland; Grow Your Own, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007); Busan Biennale 2006, Busan, South Korea; Intouchable (l’ Idea transparence), Centre National d’Art Contemporain – Villa Arson, Nice, France (2006); Day Labor, PS1/MOMA, NYC, and Vanishing Point, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Wexner, OH (2005).

JUSTIN LOWE was born in 1976 Dayton, Ohio. In 2004 he received his MFA from Columbia University. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California and New York City. Since 2003 he has been exhibiting large scale, immersive, site-specific installations in galleries and museums worldwide. Recent solo exhibitions include Stray Light Grey, Marlborough Chelsea, NY (2012); Hair of the Dog, Peppin Moore, LA (2011); Bright White Underground, Country Club LA (2010); Werewolf Karoke, Wadsworth Museum, Hartford CT (2010); The New War, Galleria Cesare Manzo (2010); Black Acid Co-op, Deitch Projects, NYC (2009); Freedom Time is Here Little Kittens, Fredric Giroux, Paris (2008); Hello Meth Lab In The Sun, Ballroom Marfa (2008); Helter Swelter, Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery (2006); Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Frederic Giroux Paris (2006); Waterfall, The Wrong Gallery (2004); Passage, PS1 Special Project Room, NYC (2004); Collecting Pictures in the Brain, Hotel Sculpture Center (2005); .45 0n the 33, Galleria Cesare Manzo, Rome, Italy (2007). His work has also been represented in the such group shows as: Greater LA (2011); The Station, Miami, FL (2008); Fit To Print: Printed Media In Collage, Gagosian Gallery, NYC (2007); FUORI USO 2006 – ALTERED STATES, National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest, Romania (2007); The Pantagruel Syndrome, Museum of Contemporary Art in the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2005); Greater New York, PS1/MOMA, NYC (2005).

More information can be found here:

Dumpster Hive: Two artists turn a blue-chip Chelsea gallery into a junk-bin fantasyland, NYMagazine (2012)

VIDEO: Freeman and Lowe at Marlborough Chelsea Gallery, BLOUIN ARTINFO (2012)

VIDEO:  JUSTIN LOWE AND JONAH FREEMAN ART TALK, Vice (2012)

Daniel Bozhkov is an artist based in New York City. He employs variety of media, from fresco to performance and video, and works with professionals from different fields to activate the public space. He enters the worlds of genetic science, department mega-stores, world-famous tourist-sites, as an amateur intruder/visitor who also functions as a producer of new strains of meaning into seemingly closed systems.

Daniel is a recipient of 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, 2007 Chuck Close Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, Alpert Award Residency Prize, and of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation, Art Matters, and Artslink. His work has been presented in international exhibitions such as the 6^th Liverpool Biennial, in 2010, 6^thMercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2007, 9^th Istanbul Biennale in Turkey in 2005, the 1^st Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art in Russia in 2005. Daniel Bozhkov is an Associate Professor of Art at Hunter College, CUNY, and has taught as a Lecturer at Columbia University and Yale University School of Art.

More information can be found here:

Liverpool Biennial Artist Talk: Daniel Bozhkov (2010)

Andrew Kreps Gallery: Daniel Bozhkov

The Woolworths Choir of 1979, 2012

Watch a clip of the video here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2012/dec/04/elizabeth-price-woolworths-choir-video

Elizabeth Price (born 1966) lives and works in London

Price predominantly works in moving image. She uses high-definition digital video, with live action, motion graphics, 3D computer animation and sound. Her work is informed by histories of narrative cinema  and experimental film, but more precisely concerned with digital video, and in particular its contemporary heterogeneity as a medium used for navigation, advertising, knowledge organisation as well as cinematic special effects.

In 2012 Price was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize. She was awarded a major production grant by Film London for her work WEST HINDER (2012), which was exhibited in a solo exhibition at The Baltic, Gateshead, and subsequently led to her being nominated for the Turner Prize. Price recently exhibited ‘USER GROUP DISCO’ (2009) as part of the British Art Show and ‘THE TENT’ (2012) at Bloomberg Space, London. She completed the Helen Chadwick Fellowship in 2011, during which she developed ‘THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979’, which was premiered at MOTINTERNATIONAL, and exhibited at Tate Britain.

USER GROUP DISCO, 2009

Watch a clip of the video here: http://vimeo.com/36307724

More information can be found here:

MOT INTERNATIONAL

Tate Britain; short artist talk (scroll down for video)

Starts at 6:30pm

RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator of Performa, is an art historian, critic, and curator whose book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, pioneered the study of performance art. Former Director of the Royal College of Art Gallery in London and Curator at The Kitchen in New York, she is also the author of Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (1998) and Laurie Anderson (2000), and is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications. In 2004, she founded Performa, a non-profit arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists from around the world, and launched New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05 (2005), followed by Performa 07 (2007), and Performa 09 (2009), and Performa 11 (2011). Since 1987, Goldberg has taught at New York University. She is the recipient of the Agnes Gund Curatorial Award (2010) and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Government (2006).

More information can be found here:

Performa

Performa TV on Youtube

Repeat Performance: The Redoubtable RoseLee Goldberg’s Performa Festival is Back and Bigger Than Ever, NY Observer (2011)

Trenton Doyle Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Raised in Paris, Texas, Hancock earned his BFA from East Texas State University, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art in 2000.  Hancock attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1997.  Hancock lives and works in Houston, where he was a 2002 Core Artist in Residence at the Glassell School of Art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  He has received numerous awards including:  Joyce Alexander Wein Award, S.J. Wallace Truman Fund Prize, Penny McCall Foundation Award, Artadia Foundation Award, and Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant.  Trenton Doyle Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, one of the youngest artists in history to participate in this prestigious survey. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Canzani Center Gallery, Columbus School of Art and Design, Columbus, OH; The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; as well as others.  Hancock has had four solo exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY as well as numerous other galleries in the United States, Singapore, Italy, and Scotland.

More information can be found here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAC_7Ceo3Ok[/youtube]

New York Times, “An Artist’s New Direction and the Bathroom Tile” by Michael Hoinski, 2012

Additional articles and reviews on James Cohan Gallery website